The saluting boy on Omaha Beach... Reader Simi L. passes along this mini-documentary about a young boy honoring the soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

I visited this beach myself some 20 years ago. I was struck by the friendliness toward Americans of the locals (a marked contrast to the rest of France). Of all the things I saw there, the cemeteries had the most impact on me...

The Middle East is a hard-to-understand muddle... Reader Jim M. passes along this attempt at clarification:

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don't like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don't like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in the fight against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren't actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

That's a wonderful distillation of a characteristic of institutions. In this post, the author uses unions as an example of this principle in action. The first one that came to my mind, though, was political parties, and individual politicians. The Shirky Principle is basically their organizing principle...

Z80 mystery solved! Many moons ago, long before my beard turned gray and my hair fell out, I made extensive use of Z80 microcomputers in systems I designed. I probably built 25 or 30 different systems using that part, so I got to be very familiar with it. The pinout of the Z80 DIP had one striking oddity: the eight data pins were out-of-order, as if the chip makers had scrambled them. This was in marked contrast to the sixteen address pins, where were in a nice, neat, orderly sequence that wrapped around the top of the package. Why would this be? Why not have all the data pins in order?

This sounds very hopeful... The so-called “super bugs” scare me. I had a brush with one of their predecessors about 20 years ago – a drug-resistant staph infection that was only cured by me wearing an IV pump that kept my system flooded with a three-component cocktail of antibiotics. Some of today's super bugs would shrug that therapy off. So the promise of a flexible approach that will work not only on existing super bugs, but also new ones that might crop up, sounds pretty darned good. As the Instapundit would say: “Faster, please!”

Abandoned cats in Aleppo... That's in Syria, if you've not been following events in the Middle East.

With all the horrors over there affecting people, we rarely think of the pets those people had – but in some ways, their situation is even more dire than their former owner's. The “cat man of Aleppo” is trying to help some of the cats abandoned in the beleaguered city...

Actual weather! Rain, lightning, and thunder echoing off the local mountains. As I write this, it's pouring outside – a big cell is passing overhead. All around me I see lightning flashes, and several times a minute a rolling thunderous crash shakes the house. Weather!